If you have been accessing Perfect World’s MMOs directly, you may be ignorant that the company’s launcher has its own daily quest system. Has for a couple of years now, actually, offering players daily tasks to complete in order to earn free in-game Zen currency in games such as Neverwinter and Star Trek Online.

Well now those good times are over — at least for the time being. Perfect World announced this week that it is disabling the Arc quests system on the PC (the Xbox version remains online) in preparation for a new and improved version that should be coming some time in the near future.

Don’t fret that this is going to set you back; the company assures players that their progress is being saved and will be imported when the system comes back online.

For Star Trek Online captains who have fallen deeply in love with their starship of choice, now they can take that ship out of the game and into their real world. Cryptic Studios announced this week that it is now offering a 3-D ship printing service for players who want an actual physical model of their in-game vehicle to put on display.

If they have the cash on hand, players have a few options for their starship replica. They can opt for an unpainted “primer version” of the ship for $200 that can be hand-painted by the player, a single-color version for $225, or a full-color collectible version for $350.

Cryptic notes that these costs “may vary” according to ship size and that a display stand comes with each model. Additionally, a few models, such as the multi-mission science vessels, are not available to print. The company handling the models, Mixed Dimensions, will wait for 100 orders at a time, so there could be a wait for a ship to be printed and shipped.

Around the time I started working at Massively-that-was, there was an article that I quite liked talking about how four high-profile MMO failures were not necessary. It was a product of its time, but the point was made that these games didn’t have to wind up in the state they were in. The mistakes that were made were not unexpected problems, but entirely predictable ones that anyone could have seen. Heck, some people did see them and pointed them out, but nothing was changed.

I think about that a lot when I think about other MMOs and online games because there are a lot of titles that, even if not entirely failed, are in states they never needed to be in. These stories are, at the very least, stories of some failures where the failure was not an inevitable end state, nor are they messes that had to be made. The writing was on the wall, the warnings were given, and someone just kept on keeping on and ignored all of the signs. And here we are.

To celebrate the arrival of Lost City of Omu for Neverwinter on PC last week, PWE has kindly given Massively OP 50 mount keys to give away to our readers! The Suratuk’s Teal-Dusted Axebeak grants +110 Movement Speed and offers three Insignia slots. And he’s a beauty!

The codes can be redeemed only once per account and expire at the end of 2020, and the mounts are bind-on-pickup. Critically, these codes are redeemable on PC only, so if you’re a console person, you can skip this one! The keys should work for all PC players except those located in China, Korea, Egypt, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

With the insane success — both in terms of popularity and finances — that Dota and League of Legends spawned, you can easily understand why game studios latched onto the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) as a relatively quick cash grab. After all, with players providing the ongoing content (through PvP matches), developers were freed up to focus on balance tweaks and churning out new skins and characters to sell.

In a relatively short span of time, the market became flooded with many imitators that sought to grab that slice of the profitable pie. And while some, such as Hi-Rez’s SMITE, have endured, many games discovered the one key danger with this approach: If you could not generate and sustain a large, active playerbase, you were as good as dead. A critical mass was needed, and when it was not achieved, games started folding up left and right.

In today’s Perfect Ten, we’re going to look at a dozen MOBAs that tried and failed to make it. Perhaps they serve as cautionary lessons to other studios seeking to mimic League of Legends’ format, but we somehow doubt that the era of the MOBA is over just yet.

On this week’s show, Bree and Justin cruise into a wild week jam-packed with updates and a full-fledged MMO reboot on top of everything else. It’s all they can do to hang on to the bucking bronco of news without being flung off into side topics, but they’ll do their best!

It’s the Massively OP Podcast, an action-packed hour of news, tales, opinions, and gamer emails! And remember, if you’d like to send in your own letter to the show, use the “Tips” button in the top-right corner of the site to do so.

Picard and crew might not have needed money in the oh-so-enlightened Federation, but if you’re going to grab a lifetime subscription to Star Trek Online, you’ll need more than Earl Grey tea and a flute as collateral. Fortunately, the cost of getting said lifetime subscription has gone down to become more affordable, at least for the next month.

The lifetime subscription comes with gold-level status and includes exclusive species, all veteran rewards, a monthly Zen stipend, priority login, another character slot, access to a special Captain’s Table area, and more.

“The latest expansion to the free-to-play MMORPG set in the Forgotten Realms takes players deeper into the jungles of Chult where they must face Acererak, the powerful lich responsible for the death curse threatening the land. This update brings Omu to life with a new adventure zone, Monster Hunts, Heroic Encounters, an Endgame Trial, smoothed level 60-70 progression, an expanded Tomb of Annihilation Campaign and more.”

Yo dawg, we heard you like hunting monsters, so we put some monsters to hunt in Neverwinter so you could hunt monsters while not hunting monsters in some other game. Yes, the hunts are returning in the Lost City of Omu, pitting players against a number of new targets for the glory of taking down vicious beasties. And, of course, the commensurate rewards for doing so. Fame is nice, but fortune pays the bills.

Of course, you can’t just walk up to a monster and smack it a couple of times to call it a proper hunt. No, you’ll want to assemble a group, place a lure, and get ready for the challenge. Hunts are present in three tiers of difficulty, but even one-star hunts will likely be too powerful for lone adventurers. So get your friends together, head out into the world, and hunt some monsters. Which really feels like a familiar premise.

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes? Well, because Neverwinter is currently lousy with snakes, that’s why. Specifically, the Yuan-ti have a center of power by the old Royal Palace of Omu, and they guard the entrance zealously to keep out the sort of people who would stab the lot of them and take their stuff. You, being a player character, will have to stab lots of them to get in there, then commence the snake-stabbing.

Also you might be able to dismantle their power base in the area by doing so, but let’s be honest, the loot alone would serve as a motivator.

Of course, the snakes aren’t going to make it easy on you; you’ll have to fight your way to the entrance and the path to the main temple, then contend with the high priests of the snake god Dendar. It’s not going to be easy, but player will have ample reason to head in there, assuming you can get over any lingering apprehension about the sheer number of snakes.

The Neverwinter system designers were on hand this week for an Ask Me Anything on Reddit about the title. Naturally, it drew a crowd interested in the nitty-gritty of specific systems and balance issues, and naturally, it elicited a lot of “we’ll take a look at that, we don’t know when that will be addressed.”

One interesting question had to do with Neverwinter’s decision to shy away from crowd control in dungeons by making the mobs immune to CC. “[Crowd control] currently just creates fights that are trivial and you generally don’t even need a build dedicated to controlling for enemies to be locked down,” the team said, going on to mention that no CC rework is planned for the future.

But there’s a third-act positive twist! The company has partnered up again with Mixed Dimensions, and custom-printed ships are back on the table, so you can once more look forward to your very own USS Dicksmash. You can check out a sample gallery just below, or you can keep your eyes peeled for a livestream discussion on the new merch at 6:00 p.m. EST. Obviously, the game doesn’t have the best track record with these plans at the moment, but the effort is being made once more!